Off the Charts

by Ann Hulbert

  Little wonder, too, that Gertrude was worried. Though Shirley, now nine, only dimly understood what was going on, her mother faced a crisis in 1937 that seemed to fortify the gumption that grounded both of them. Confronted with a medical scare, which called for surgery, an apprehensive Gertrude wrote to the old friend whom she had chosen as her maternal surrogate. Relations had already been tense with 20th Century Fox because she felt the studio wasn’t giving Shirley roles that nurtured her growth. But with her friend, she wanted to discuss Shirley’s continued thriving “as a human entity.” “Any career child,” she wrote, “is at a tremendous disadvantage,” in need of inner bulwarks against “greed, selfishness, and flattery.” Shirley had all that it took—patience, a sense of justice, tenderness, sensitivity, plus what Gertrude knew (though didn’t say) she lacked herself, “a joyous spirit, full of pranks and teasing.” Gertrude wanted to be sure those qualities were defended, not least Shirley’s bold energy. Doing that had been a challenge for Gertrude—and not just because Hollywood made it hard. Again, she didn’t say this, but Shirley intimated it: her mother had needed to overcome her own primness, and irrepressible Shirley helped her manage that. As she did in her letter, Gertrude mustered her clout to stand up for the feistiness that defined her daughter—and which, as it happened, was also a secret of Shirley’s success.

  During the two weeks that Gertrude was away in the hospital, Shirley never doubted that she would come home. But in the gloom, trying “to cope with the gaping hole caused by her absence,” she sank briefly into “a swampland of confusion and helplessness.” She wept every night with regret at taking her mother’s love for granted and failing to convey hers. When a frail Gertrude returned, they rallied. Darryl Zanuck, the vice-president and head of production, decided to see how far Shirley could stretch (and to send her mother a be-careful-what-you-wish-for signal). To test Shirley’s dramatic skills, he paired her with the legendary—and famously child-averse—director John Ford, “a blood-and-thunder mentor of hairy-chested males,” Shirley the memoirist noted. In Wee Willie Winkie she was to play a valiant little peacekeeper in colonial India. The cards seemed stacked against her.

  Except that Shirley hadn’t just been coasting on cuteness so far by any means. Two years of honing her dancing skills with a legendary master of that art, Bill Robinson, had made her fearless in the face of daunting calls for excellence. The man whom Shirley considered the all-important mentor of her heart and feet had shown her (against lots of evidence, in life and in her movies) that demanding adults could be counted on to deliver serious, challenging fun. As Shirley described her meeting with Robinson at her cottage door early in 1935, it was a scene out of one of her movies. They started walking across the lot together, and when Robinson realized that Shirley was trying to catch up and hold his hand, he slowed down and took hers. It was the beginning of not just a partnership but an unusual friendship. She proposed that she call him Uncle Billy. He agreed, if he could call her darlin’.

  Shirley had no idea what buttons she was pushing—but that was the point. According to Hollywood lore, Sheehan had summoned Robinson thanks in part to the director D. W. Griffith’s remark that mixing blond-girl innocence with black characters would “raise the gooseflesh on the back of an audience.” Robinson knew that he roused ire in Harlem by complying with Hollywood’s racist rules, taking Uncle Tom roles and paying lucrative court to Shirley—but that wasn’t his point. Bridling at the criticism, he trusted his scene-stealing powers on-screen to contribute to a mission he once described this way to a black reporter. “I am a race man!” he insisted. “I strive upon every turn to tear down any barriers that have existed between our two races and to establish harmonious relationship for all.”

  As a child, Shirley only gradually, and never completely, became aware of the Jim Crow realities that Robinson navigated in Hollywood and beyond it. But as soon as they began work together on The Little Colonel, a tale of family schisms set in the postbellum South, she made a thrilling discovery: he dealt with her as more of an equal than any other actor did—even though, or because, he was her teacher. Robinson took her seriously as a professional, rather than treating her as a pretty little “windup toy” that performed on demand (as even Gertrude could sometimes slip up and do). The singing and acting required by most of Shirley’s roles expressly didn’t call for feats of self-transformation. But tap-dancing “is an utterly unnatural skill,” she emphasized in retrospect. Getting very good at it gave an ambitious girl the chance, with Robinson’s one-of-a-kind guidance, “to elevate my ability to the height of my energy.”

  Unfazed that Shirley barely knew even the basics of tap, Robinson made the stair dance, which became the virtuosic centerpiece of the melodrama The Little Colonel, work brilliantly—and on short notice. The idea dawned late that Shirley, playing the family reconciler to Robinson’s beloved family retainer, would join him in the routine that was his specialty. They were, Shirley liked to say later, the first interracial couple to dance on-screen in history—at a time when few dared do it off-screen (and when all on-screen physical contact between them had to be cut in the South). He deftly choreographed around the problem that childish body proportions make agile leg action hard, and came up with a trick to allow her to get more sound: she would kick the stair riser. Then they got busy. As Shirley later wrote, he was “imperturbable and kind, but demanding.” His key advice was “Let’s get your feet attached to your ears,” and he showed her exactly what that meant. Proud of her powers of concentration and her zeal to nail things, she thrived on his high standards for precision and clarity. With him beside her, she couldn’t get enough of the relentless practice that committed every move to muscle memory.

  Perhaps because Robinson knew how it felt to be patronized as a naïvely cheerful hoofer whose feet just get to tappin’, he imparted more than technique. He was the rare adult who actually gave Shirley a chance to practice a real version of the pieties she preached on-screen. Working with him, she discovered that hard-won mastery, enabled by a sympathetic and confident ally, can deliver self-respect and joyful fulfillment. Pulling off their routines, and achieving total synchrony as he carefully matched his moves to hers, was its own reward—“a final moment of elation in a long sequence totally devoid of drudgery.” On-screen, too, Robinson’s cool authority had a way of subverting a servant role that put him on a level with a child. In their next collaboration, The Littlest Rebel (a Civil War drama), he was again the only real grown-up anywhere in sight, ready to listen and to lead. He was the first black film character, a historian has remarked, responsible for a white one.

  Wee Willie Winkie offered nothing like the challenge of tap dancing, but Shirley rose to the dramatic occasion (and proudly defied Ford’s antichild prejudice in the process). Shirley is “growing up,” the New Yorker film critic wrote, “…and there is a definite expansion of personality.” Expansion of body, however, contributed to a drop in box office ratings as the 1930s ended. Good as her word, Gertrude and George bought out the rest of Shirley’s 20th Century Fox contract when Gertrude saw no worthwhile work in store. Shirley had just turned twelve, and her mother’s timing was right. As Gertrude said in a carefully crafted statement, her daughter needed a “life with other girls and boys of her own age, in school and during recreation hours, so that she will not develop an isolated viewpoint, which often brings on an unhappy outlook on life.” Through the 1940s, Shirley dabbled in movies, but mainly she was a student at the exclusive Westlake School for Girls. Soon she became a popular wheeler-dealer there, too—not least with boys.

  She didn’t stick to Gertrude’s tidy, happy script. Shirley, constantly called on during her childhood to rescue adults, was now in a hurry to claim her independence. At seventeen, she thought she was doing that when, in September 1945, over her parents’ objections, she married twenty-five-year-old John Agar, the brother of a Westlake friend. George and Gertrude granted her only a small allowance as the couple moved into her renovated playhouse, hardly
an ideal launching pad for a not-quite-ex-star and her insecure husband. Shirley signed a contract with David O. Selznick and was also loaned to other studios for several pictures, with mixed success. Agar drank and had affairs and, she later revealed, hit her. By twenty, Shirley had a baby, but her marriage was beyond saving. Her film career was going nowhere.

  Shirley filed for divorce at twenty-one in 1949. On a recuperative trip to Hawaii, she met Charles Black, a rare specimen—an American who had never seen a Shirley Temple movie. As they prepared to marry in 1950, she made a shocking discovery: her parents had run through her fortune. A decade earlier Gertrude and George had signed a pledge to hold half of their daughter’s earnings in trust until she was twenty-one. It was a gesture in the spirit of the Coogan Act of 1939, which mandated that protection for child stars but didn’t retrospectively cover Shirley. While shocking tales of greedy relatives fleecing young actors were stirring legislators to action, no one had worried about her—the epitome of well-tended talent.

  Shirley and Charles took a vow of silence on the subject, “honoring family unity over material cupidity” (and deciding that George must have been duped). There she was, bailing out her elders again. But Shirley was also asserting a confident autonomy that she had developed early. And perhaps she had in mind Bill Robinson, who had died penniless in 1949. “There’s no use in going through life as if you were in a funeral procession. After all, there’s a lot of fun in it, so why grump and grouse?” he once told a reporter. “Why not dance through life?” His acolyte stuck with that outlook. Shirley Temple Black went on to work in television, ran unsuccessfully for Congress as a Republican, and was named ambassador first to Ghana and then to Czechoslovakia as Communism was collapsing, hardly luxury posts. As her early screen years might have predicted, she found her most fulfilling vocation in diplomacy.

  · 3 ·

  While Gertrude Temple was cramming her fetus with cultural enrichment in early 1928, the path awaiting Philippa Schuyler was being laid. Josephine Cogdell and George Schuyler got married on January 6, in thrall to each other and to a cause: challenging racial hypocrisies in the name of future racial harmony. George had just published a satiric takedown of “Our White Folks,” which was causing a stir as the lead essay in H. L. Mencken’s American Mercury. In his piece, George mocked those eager to proclaim “that the Negro is as good as they are—as if that were a compliment!—and to swear by all the gods that they want to give him a square deal and a chance in the world,” while offering nothing of the sort. He also mocked the notion of a “natural aversion” to intermarriage: Why then the need for so many laws against it? Where George was caustic, Josephine waxed romantic, a daughter of the racist South who had dramatically disowned her heritage. The white race is “spiritually depleted,” she wrote in her diary the week before she and George legalized their union. “America must mate with the Negro to save herself.”

  In her bond with George, Josephine heralded the square deal that would right the racial imbalance: “He needs to be cherished and inflated as I need to be pruned.” She would “give him greater confidence in himself…make him certain of his superiority.” Under George’s firm hand, she would never “quit growing and solidify.” But they shouldn’t expect any outside help in their bold experiment, George warned the morning after their marriage, as he hurried out of town on an assignment. “Do you know, Josephine, we stand absolutely alone? We can’t count on anybody,” a remark she recorded in her diary. “The whole world is against us, the negroes as well as the whites?” Three and a half years later, they had company. Philippa arrived on August 2, 1931. She was just the youthful race-straddling recruit their cause needed—and a child-rearing project made to order for restless Josephine, who felt she had “dropped completely out of sight.” It never occurred to her and George that in counting on their daughter to win over the world, they might be giving her—as they did in her diet—a very raw deal.

  The child star craze had equal opportunity allure—ordinary, middle-class Shirley soared—and Hollywood fueled the promise of upward mobility with rags-to-riches plots that celebrated America’s cooperative spirit. The Schuylers were well aware that Philippa tested any such storyline. But even before their baby began precociously talking, Josephine touted “extra vitality” as a biracial asset in the more competitive contest she faced: Philippa would have to prove herself a superior specimen, not just a sparkly girl. In Josephine’s analysis of “hybrid vigor,” heredity and history mingled. George, the key progenitor, brought emblematic black virtues to the mix. He provided “a splendid example of courage and endurance,” having “from the cradle overcome the greatest difficulties without losing his sense of humor.” Her own stock was a problem. As Josephine had recently written in an anonymous account of her racial awakening, she was the spoiled scion of a prosperous clan of ranchers and bankers who exemplified white folks’ flaws: they were unjust bigots and joyless egotists.

  Josephine professed to have discovered “the peace of humility” since her marriage, but joyless egotism ran deeper than she recognized. So did a proclivity to “go to extremes,” one of the traits George ascribed to white folks—and he was rarely home to rein her in (not that he would have dared to try). Right after Philippa’s birth, he went off to investigate the Liberian slave trade, and then kept up a frenetic pace of reporting and speaking: paying the rent in the Depression wasn’t easy. Josephine leaned on the wisdom of the behaviorist John Broadus Watson (a protégé, like George, of Mencken’s). Gleefully immoderate in his book Psychological Care of Infant and Child, he blamed “too much mother love” for creating emotional cripples, and he prescribed a formula in line with Josephine’s nutritional zealotry. All toughness, next to no sweetness: that was Watson’s secret to raising a sturdy child who could be steered to any vocation and would end up, he promised, an adaptable adult able to cope in an unpredictable world. Treat her like a small adult, he lectured parents. Be scant with praise and strict about routines. Avoid cuddling and kissing at all costs.

  Where Gertrude Temple merely dabbled in the brusque parenting vogue, Josephine went overboard—in private. In public, she sounded if anything more laid-back than Gertrude when, in August 1934, she took a turn in the spotlight in a New York Herald Tribune article that reads like a parody of a Hollywood child-star profile. The newspaper sent Joseph W. Alsop (the future Washington columnist was then a twenty-three-year-old Harvard graduate) to 321 Edgecombe Avenue to watch as “Harlem’s Youngest Philosopher Parades Talent on 3d Birthday.” The headline continued, “Philippa Schuyler Spells, Draws and Then Rushes for Her Health Ice Cream.” Also in a facetious vein, the accompanying photograph showed a small savage rather than a sage. In it, Philippa could almost be mistaken for one of the wary little cannibals on the set of Shirley Temple’s most offensive Baby Burlesk short, Kid in Africa. She is semicrouched against a backdrop of foliage, naked except for a headband adorned with leaves. Her gaze is serious, and she betrays no trace of a smile.

  Noting that her writer parents “sternly deny that she is a prodigy,” Alsop wryly portrayed a child whose mother had clearly run her through her repertoire on other occasions. On the one hand, though he didn’t put it like this, here was a higher-brow, and even more wholesome, young talent than the Shirley phenomenon. Where Hollywood’s brand-new attraction dimpled and danced for a mass audience, Philippa twirled her globe and spelled:

  “I want my globe,” remarked Philippa, emerging from behind her mother’s shoulder and casting herself on the floor in an attitude of which Cleopatra in her best days would not have been ashamed. The globe was produced. With a small, but unerring, hand, with which she liked to cover each indicated locality, she pointed out the continents and countries suggested to her. Asia, India, Africa, Australia were picked out, and each time she spelled the name, making a little song out of Australia.

  “That’s Ceylon,” added Philippa, as a voluntary. “C-E-Y-L-O-N. And that’s Madagascar. M-A-D-A-G-A-S-C-A-R.”

  This seemed
to call for a certain emphasis, so she turned round twice gracefully and rapidly on the rug, ending flat on her stomach.

  On the other hand, Alsop hinted at the possibility that perhaps everything wasn’t quite so effortless and unselfconscious as mother and daughter, both dressed in “bright silk pajamas,” endeavored to convey.

  But he only hinted. Philippa certainly didn’t lack for energy, demonstrating her spelling prowess to “the accompaniment of violent kicking with both legs and considerable smiling.” If her performance was getting a bit tiresome by the time she climbed on a chair for recitation time—some doggerel, “My Country ’Tis of Thee,” Countee Cullen’s “What Is Africa to Me”—it was also impressive, and she was adorable as she turned to her blackboard to write, draw, and do a few sums. Her mother didn’t sound like a taskmaster. In describing her dietary regimen, Josephine emphasized fruit and fresh ice cream, not the raw meat part. Her teaching method, she said, was “to have no method,” merely to indicate her own interest and leave it to Philippa to follow. Yet Alsop also observed that Josephine had very precisely calibrated her daughter’s progress (eighth-grade level in noun spelling and fourth grade in verbs). Columbia University’s psychology department, he took note, had been alerted.

  Implicitly, the article raised a question that, in addition to being condescending and racist, was real: Was this pair perhaps trying too hard? A biracial child faced extra hurdles, and Philippa’s started at home, where George, too, seemed to have forgotten one important way in which he believed black folks had it all over “Our White Folks.” They, he had written, “have learned how to enjoy themselves without too much self-consciousness and exhibitionism.” Josephine put Alsop’s article in the scrapbooks that she and George had begun keeping since shortly after Philippa’s birth.